The film opens with a long back story and continues with more back story as the tale
progresses.

It over-explains. It reveals its supernatural menace not just in glimpses but full on and early
on. There is never any doubt that this might all be in somebody’s head.

But
Mama is a reminder that the best chills don’t involve chain saws, blood and guts. Horror
is a product of empathy — in this case, fearing for the safety of small children and the reluctant
20-something rock musician (Jessica Chastain) stuck with caring for them.

A prologue tells of a tragedy. A distraught father (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) flees financial
scandal by shooting people, grabbing his children and fleeing into the snowy mountains of Virginia.
He drags the innocent little girls to a remote cabin, and, just as he is about to finish his
horror, something happens to him.

Cut to five years later, when searchers finally find the girls. They’re feral, non-verbal,
skittering around on all fours like rats. Their Uncle Lucas (also Coster-Waldau), an artist, is
ready to take them in. His bass-playing girlfriend, Annabel (Chastain), is not.

But, thanks to financial arrangements made by a conniving psychotherapist (Daniel Kash) who sees
glory in their case, the couple move to a free house in Richmond and try to bring the girls — Lilly
(Isabelle Nelisse) doesn’t speak but only gurgles, grunts, eats cherries and sleeps with tree limbs
— back into the human race.

Thanks to whatever kept them alive for five years in the woods, that isn’t going to be easy.

Producer Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) must have had a hand in the production values here, which are state of
the art. But what makes
Mama work are the performances that co-writer and director Andres Muschietti got from the
little girls, who are open-faced marvels, conflicted about where their loyalties lie — with “Don’t
call me Mom” or with “Mama.”

And Chastain, far from slumming in a horror film just as she is fighting for that
Zero Dark Thirty Oscar, adds another gold star to her resume. Annabel is unhappy,
ill-equipped for parenting, standoffish. Chastain makes her immature and yet somehow
sympathetic.

Horror is all about the short circuit that the screen’s technical manipulations — including
music and editing — cause in our brain, so this isn’t high art. But
Mama is easily the most moving, most chilling ghost story since
Insidious, an emotional tale efficiently and affectingly told.